Posted by Doug
Wed, 07 Dec 2005 14:38:05 GMT
I was saddened to read this story of Behind the Scenes of Image Theft. It’s about a photojournalist, David Leeson, and some images he took in Iraq. He gave some of his best images to the Army for them to use in their yearbook. This CD of images was then copied and passed around many, many times. The sad part is then the ever growing list of people who have tried to pass the images off as their own.
There’s a lot of talk about “information wants to be free”. Sharing information with your friends is one thing. Claiming authorship of said information is another. David’s tale demonstrates several times, what he wanted most was proper credit for the images. We’re not talking about someone who’s extorting lots of money or scamming the public for more and more money. Just a photographer looking for proper credit. This story clearly shows why we need copyright in the first place. It would be wrong to abolish copyright.
An interesting side note about this story. Mark Hancock, another photojournalist, recommends always ingest and never copy images from your camera. This is so that you can at least assign copyright to the EXIF data at the earliest possible moment. The interesting part of David Leesom’s tale is often people would discover he was the original photographer of his images by the copyright in the EXIF. I’m surprised none of the people who were stealing credit for the images had the sense to alter the EXIF.
It’s clear setting the copyright in the EXIF data isn’t foolproof. Almost any image editing program can strip all the EXIF when saving images. However, it is a tool in protecting your work. There are also lots and lots of Photoshop actions for adding watermarks to your images. I’m sure these type of batch jobs are possible in other image editors too. Obviously you don’t want to watermark your original images. I think that was David’s mistake. He gave out his originals without some means of enforcing his “terms of use”.
Posted in Copyright, Freedom, Photography | Tags EXIF | 3 comments
Posted by Doug
Wed, 09 Nov 2005 15:27:48 GMT
My buddy, Britton Fraley pointed me to Radiant Vista today. What a wonderful website! Most photo sites are either crap for design or over-the-top flash. This one has a wonderful layout and design. That’s just what encouraged me to look around. It’s the content that has me so excited.
I feel like the site could use a little more “about me” stuff. I didn’t really know what to expect as I was wandering around. Most of the site is Quicktime videos. The Daily Critiques are videos of the site contributors reviewing a photo. I like hearing their voice describe their impressions and critique. I like seeing their mouse pointer move about the image highlighting what they are talking about. I like seeing the improvements to the photos as they make simple adjustments to improve the image.
There is also a nice 16 minute video tutorial called, A Primer on Composition. Again, the mix of voice, images, and pointer is used for excellent effect.
But I’m saving the best part to last. There’s a PDF aticle on The Myth of Talent that pushed me to ecto to write this note. It’s an excellent affirmation of everything I had hoped about art.
...the truth about talent is this—talent is a set of skills you
develop over time through desire.
I’m an aspiring photographer. By no means am I good. I’m pleased to say my work has improved over the last year though. When people see me they don’t say “artist”. My past is not littered with examples of great works of art. By all rights I should just admit I’m not a talented photographer and stick to what I am good at: programming. But this article gives me hope.
He talks about why we buy into the myth that talent is a “natural ability of a superior quality”. I agree with the author, Craig M. Tanner, the biggest reason is fear.
Being labeled talented only means we have survived being untalented.
So for some period of time we have to be untalented. It’s the fear of doing badly that keeps us from “surviving being untalented”. I’ve talked about this fear meme before. When I was taking photography classes at the University of Cincinnati Communiversity, my instructor said that fear is the opposite of creativity. That was a powerful thought. This article on talent’s talk about fear is further reenforcement.
Even if you don’t think of yourself as an “artist” or want to be a photographer, I highly recommend this article.
Posted in Internet, Photography | Tags creativity, critique, fear, talent, tutorial | 3 comments
Posted by Doug
Mon, 24 Oct 2005 01:33:07 GMT
Now that Adobe’s DNG Converter can be used from the command line, I’ve written a new script to ingest photos from compact flash, convert to DNG, and rename based on EXIF.
The bad news is that the script is written in Perl and relies upon the Image::ExifTool module from CPAN. I know there are those of you who read my blog that look down on both Perl and CPAN. However, it’s still the language I can write utility scripts in fastest.
So, here’s my “workflow”
- Scan the CF with File::Find to get a list of all the images
- Sort those images by their ‘DateTimeOriginal’ from the EXIF data.
- Generate a new filename based on YYYYMMDD_NNN.foo where NNN is the next serial number for that particular day.
- For each image either: 1) copy the image using the new filename if it’s a JPEG; or 2) run DNG Converter on it if it’s RAW renaming to the new filename
- UPDATED: Apply an Adobe XMP Template to resulting file.
The script accepts the source directory as the first command line argument and the destination directory as the second argument. If you’re opposed to processing images during ingest, just copy from the CF to some temporary directory and ingest from there. Also, the script uses File::Path to create the destination directory if it doesn’t exist.
Ideally, I’d like to be able to specify an XMP template to apply metadata to the images as I ingest them; but I haven’t gotten that far yet. I guess Image::ExifTool can write XMP. I’ll have to look into doing that. It’d save me a step or two at least. UPDATE: I talked with Phil Harvey, the author of ExifTool, today on the CPAN Forum for Image-ExifTool about adding XMP metadata from a Template file. He was kind enough to release a new exiftool v5.71 that includes this feature. As a result, I’ve added support into my image_ingest.pl script.
You can download image_ingest.pl here. ( UPDATED: The latest version is 1.1) There’s not much configurability to the script. The only thing you really need to configure is the path to where you’ve saved Adobe’s DNG Converter. This also means that the script won’t work on anything but Mac and Windows. Odds are getting it to run on Windows will be a problem since: a) most Windows machines don’t have Perl; and b) I haven’t tested this at all with respect to paths and filenames.
Posted in Programming, Photography | Tags DNG, EXIF, Perl, XMP | no comments
